Edwin Noreño is one of Colombia’s true processing obsessives. Known among friends as “El Alquimista” (the alchemist), Edwin has dialed in a wide repertoire of fermentation profiles, often using multiple fermentations in sequence to achieve a desired expression. This honey process microlot was made possible using carefully selected gesha cherries from his farm, and then fermenting the cherry three distinct times, using the coffee’s own fermentation byproduct—the sticky cherry must—as a flavor “intensifying” agent. Augmented fermentations and fortified flavor profiles have become Edwin’s specialty in the past few years; however, unlike many other infused or co-fermented profiles produced on Finca Campo Hermoso, this 2-bag gesha lot uses nothing but the coffee itself in processing. Quindío Department and Finca Campo Hermoso For such a naturally gifted department as Quindío, it tends to receive less recognition than others for its coffee. Quindío is Colombia’s second-smallest department by size, making up only about 0.2% of the national territory. It’s location, however, right on the central cordillera of Colombia’s vast Andes divide, and centrally between the country’s largest and most influential cities (Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali), give it a high volume of tourist traffic, coffee industry, airline commuters, and idyllic getaways in the form of brightly painted mountain towns, natural reserves, and high elevation tropical landscapes throughout. Almost the entire department is mountainous, its lowest elevations still over 1000 meters, and many parts are dense with coffee plantations, from the small to the large and ambitious. Finca Campo Hermoso is a 15-hectare farm outside of Circasia, only a few kilometers north of Quindío’s capital city, Armenia. Its owner, Edwin Noreña, is an agroindustrial engineer by trade with graduate-level studies in biotechnology. Edwin is a well-connected and highly aspirational coffee producer who focuses on pairing very specific cultivars with very specific processing methods designed to express the most surprising, memorable, and delicious coffees possible within his resources. Finca Campo Hermoso concentrates on growing a wide variety of coffee genetics, including pink bourbon, yellow bourbon, yellow caturra, bourbon sidra, gesha, and Cenicafé 1, a resistant hybrid developed by Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research institute. The resulting coffees are often marketed under “El Alquimista”, Edwin’s personal brand for his microlots, which have featured in barista competitions and choosy roasters around the world (and Royal Coffee’s own inventory on an annual basis). Processing, particularly the fermentation step, always interested Edwin because of its potential to transform raw coffee seeds into a remarkably unique sensory experience for coffee drinkers. A breakthrough moment for him was realizing that the sugary, residual liquid produced during the fruit fermentation (known as the must in winemaking) could be used again in subsequent fermentations to add natural sugars, and also serve as a solvent for flavoring agents. Over the years Edwin has co-fermented with chilis, ginger, fruit, and brewer’s hops to develop unique flavors in his microlots. This lot, on the other hand, is all coffee. Honey Intense Process You know you’re writing about a complicated process when you need to start with an abstract. Here goes. Edwin’s processing for this particular lot involved three distinct whole cherry fermentations before the coffe was honey processed: one of fresh picked cherry on its own; a second one with more intentional oxygen deprivation; and a third one in which the cherry was accompanied by the coffee cherry must (a biproduct of the second fermentation) which had been pre-fermented on its own. Finally, the thrice-fermented cherry was depulped and moved immediately to raised screen beds to dry, just like a traditional dark honey would be. Each stage adds a particular bit of uniqueness to the final coffee, so that by the end the coffee is truly one of a kind in the world. The first fermentation was with fresh coffee cherry only, carefully hand-sorted for ripeness and consistency, washed clean, and immediately moved into covered tanks to ferment for 24 hours with limited oxygen. Some consider this kind of step to be a “pre-fermentation" because the coffee is not fully fermented; rather, the coffee fruit becomes dramatically softer, sweeter, and more acetic as the flesh begins to overripen and break down. Once the first, short fermentation was complete the cherries were moved into 2000kg tanks for a second, fully oxygen deprived, fermentation. This type of treatment is known as “carbonic maceration”, since the oxygen is pushed out a one-way valve leaving the cherry to sit surrounded by its own carbon dioxide instead. During this phase the cherry leaches out a concentrated sticky, sugary runoff, called the mossto or “must”, not unlike the must from freshly smashed grapes and skins in winemaking. After the second fermentation was complete, the cherry was separated from its must and moved into much smaller tanks, of 200kg capacity each. The must was then fermented on its own, along with brewer’s yeast to inoculate the process. The fermented must was then mixed into the coffee cherry, at a ratio of 30mL per kilogram. The cherry and must were sealed together into the smaller tanks to ferment a third time for another 72 hours. In the final step the fermented cherry was lightly depulped leaving most of the mucilage intact (similar to what a “black” honey would be in Costa Rica), and moved directly to Edwin’s greenhouse to dry on raised screen beds, where it dried for 10 days. Like all microlots at Campo Hermoso, the final fully dried coffee was conditioned for 8 days in a warehouse, allowing for humidity to stabilize inside the seeds, and then moved into GrainPro bags for long-term storage, where it was cupped numerous times over the next few weeks for quality analysis.
